I'm attempting to protect President Kimball.

When I arrive at the Dam and talk to the Lietenant, screen fades to black as a day passes, and when it returns, as soon as the level is fully visible, the game consistently hangs and crashes to desktop.

So. Flipping. Aggravating.

Is there a workaround for this?

After a reinstall of the game, clean & unpatched, I was able to progress till the vertibird landed. Now that's where it consistently crashes.

Another clean install, this time patched. Now it crashes when the Vertibird starts to swoop in.

It can't be a specific trigger that causes the crash, because I was finally able to quicksave, wait five seconds, quicksave, CRASH my way through it. What a nightmare.

That was terribly unclear. I shouldn't post at 3:00am...

What I meant was that I was able to play the game quicksaving every five seconds, and when the game crashed, I could resume from the last save losing only a few seconds of play. After the President started his speech, the game went smoothly until the first assassination attempt, where it crashed again and I had to repeat the process of crawling through five minutes of game in 10 second increments.

Since it isn't crashing at a particular event trigger, I don't think that its a misfiring quest script that is causing the foulups.

I have the exact same problem as you. I gave up playing the game altogether though. Gonna try your "solution" and hope it fixes it for me too...

really agravatting

Another trick that helped me in a different spot was installing a fresh copy into a different directory (without uninstalling the old), not patching or adding mods of any kind, rushing through the area/quest that was causing the problem, saving, then uninstalling the second installation. Your computer will not realize that you still have the old installation present until you reinstall (again) over top of your original install, then reapplying the patch, and finally reenabling any mods you may have installed.

Then you -might- be able to load up the save from the second install that is past the problem area and progress from there.

To try to pinpoint the issue here, what is your hardware configuration/OS?

I'm running Windows 7 on a 2.5ghz dual core Athlon with a Geforce 9800 GTX, SB Audigy, and 4gb of RAM.

didn't work for, I'll just be patient

OS: win 7 32 bits
CPU: intel e6750
GPU: ati readon HD 4850

also have dual boot on xp, same bug happens, and crashes as soon as I fire at something, VATS or not

Wow, now it crashes when I head to the Dam for the end game.